The AI boom and success of Nvidia, now the U.S. market’s largest stock, have made the semiconductor sector one of the most closely watched corners of the market. Nvidia’s rise to a market cap over $4 trillion has led to concerns about the S&P 500’s concentration in a handful of tech stocks. But in another respect, a focus on chip stocks as an investment theme can be worth a look for investors with an aggressive bent.Wall Street is finding new ways to create more concentrated bets on the chip sector.The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) has been the standard for investors looking to capture the sector’s growth. Its portfolio spans the global supply chain: Nvidia designs GPUs, TSMC manufactures them, and ASML supplies the necessary equipment. It has grown to nearly $30 billion, according to VettaFi, and is up close to 30% since the beginning of the year.The Vanguard S&P 500 ETF and SPDR S&P 500 ET Trust (SPY), meanwhile, are up around 13%.On CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this past Monday, VanEck’s product manager Nicholas Frasse said SMH has worked because of its team of winners at the top. The structure has been key to performance especially as demand for AI has risen. Nvidia was once a gaming chip company, and now it is the face of the AI build out.On the chipmaker’s most recent earnings call, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described its Blackwell platform as, “the next generation AI the world’s been waiting for,” and the head of the chip company added that demand was near “extraordinary.”Its links across the tech sector and economy are growing: on Thursday, Nvidia announced it would invest $5 billion in Intel to co-develop data centers and PC chips, among the oldest of Silicon Valley’s old guard companies, which the Trump administration recently invested a 10% equity stake in as a matter of national security.The popular VanEck fund isn’t the only ETF benefitting from the semiconductor industry’s success. The iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) and the Invesco PHLX Semiconductor ETF (SOXQ) each offer slightly different chip exposures, and both of them have drawn in investors looking for ways to gain concentrated exposure to the chip story.Many of the same chip names top the holdings across these ETFs, though exact weights do vary. But another fast-growing alternative is the SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF (XSD), which differentiates itself with an equal-weighting approach to stocks held in its underlying index. This means smaller names like Astera Labs and Credo Technology get representation on par with Nvidia or Broadcom.Case in point: Nvidia’s weight in the fund is currently under 3%, compared to a weighting of over 20% in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF; 12% in the Invesco ETF; and roughly 8% in the iShares fund. Nvidia’s current weight in the S&P 500 is roughly 8%.The SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF’s assets under management is $1.51 billion, according to VettaFi, a lot smaller than SMH or the iShares’ SOXX, at over $14 billion. But the fund is up roughly 26% since the beginning of the year, besting the iShares’ ETF performance.SPDR S&P Semiconductor ETF Top HoldingsAstera LabsCredo TechnologyImpinjRigetti Computing …
